047 Did Solomon’s temple contain a seven-branched lampstand known as a menorah? Most people answer this question with an automatic “of course.” 048 But the Biblical text is not so clear. The...

038 One Sunday morning several years ago, a most astonishing thing happened to me. I was attending services at a local church in Claremont, California, where I was a graduate student working on a (then) relatively obscure text known as the Gospel...

023 Robert Miller’s thoughtful response to critics of the Jesus Seminar, myself included, is of value not least because of its irenic tone. It was my aim when I wrote The Jesus Quest (InterVarsity Press, 1995) to approach the matter in the...

041 Psalms 9 and 10 have always been somewhat of a puzzle. The first question is whether they are actually two parts of one long psalm or whether they are two separate psalms. What suggests that they were originally really one piece is that...

045 I want to say here and now how grateful I am to the original team of Dead Sea Scroll scholars who failed to publish the bulk of the scrolls for nearly 40 years and refused to let other scholars see them in the meantime. But for them, I would...

075 The fragmentary Dead Sea Scroll that is the subject of this article has been much discussed by scholars since our recent publication of it in a scientific journal,1 and it has even received some notice in the popular press, principally...

054 The Quote Heard ’Round the World It was 1948—I was studying theology and the Bible in Louvain (Belgium) at a college run by French-speaking Jesuits—when I first read in the press about a sensational Hebrew manuscript discovery dating to the...

032 032 Archaeology is full of surprises. Sometimes we don’t find what we had expected to find. Or we find something we never expected to find. Either way, the experience is always exciting—and...

019 Dead Sea Scroll scholarship is undergoing a virtual revolution. New ideas and perspectives are percolating among the small group of scholars who dedicate themselves to primary research on the content of the scrolls. Recent publications focus...

032 The Talmud is, after the Bible itself, Judaism’s most significant and revered collection of sacred writings. Although the Talmud was in fact written and compiled between the Second and Fifth centuries A.D., rabbinic tradition holds that...

024 When we returned to Nabratein in upper Galilee for our second excavation season in June 1981, we were unaware of a movie called “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” This may be difficult to believe, but it is true. Day by day we excavated in the clear...

044 This is almost as much a personal story of luck and adventure as it is an archaeological story. It tells of my first dig—my own dig, that is—after graduating with a B.A. in archaeology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My story will...

028 Scholars have long theorized that collections of Jesus’ sayings circulated in the decades following his death and that therefore they would be among the earliest witnesses to his message. Modern critical scholars have even been able to...

034 The Lost Gospel. The very concept provokes a flood of questions. If it is lost, how do we know it ever existed? How do we know what was in it? Who lost it? And how was it lost? Perhaps most intriguing of all: Will it ever be found? A new book...